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The ISEF08 winners have been announced, and the recipients of the grand prize scholarships are these fine young ladies (left to right, below): Natalie Omattage of Cleveland, MS; Yi-Han Su of Taipei, Taiwan (I’m politically incorrect like that); and Sana Raoof of Muttontown, NY. While they were being put through the wringer for publicity photos, I asked them to do one more silly pose. Eat this, “Math is Hard” Barbie!

Oh, to be eighteen again!

Some mobile video from the N95:

MP4 format

We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!

But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.

I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.

Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.

That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.

There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?

I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.

This is the kind of thing I’m spending a good portion of my time staring at this week.

No, I don’t know what you’re supposed to see in that. If I did, I’d be graduating like next week. You know how those CSI shows always have very exciting conclusive breaking evidence that shows under the microscope how they can catch the killer? Yeah, that doesn’t happen most of the time. And it’s not happening now.

So, I’ll just get back to drinking my half-caffeinated coffee and trying to figure out why that obviously looks like shear crack growth under constant tension.

After gorging on turkey and whatnots, we all took a walk along the beach (the Myrtle one). Turns out, if you do a 15 second exposure on ISO 800, you get some pretty cool images that look quite like daylight.

These were taken by nothing but moonlight at around 9pm. Giddyup.

Greenville, SC, is a lovely town; if you ever have the occasion, I suggest a weekend getaway there. I would not, however, suggest any kind of getaway in Islamabad.

While I was in Greenville interviewing Senator Joe Biden about Pakistan, among other things, General Pervez Musharraf decided to suspend the constitution in Pakistan and declare a general charlie-foxtrot. If I had only checked my stupid email on my crappy cellphone while waiting for my face time with the Senator, I could have gotten his first, raw reaction to the actualization of the kind of suck he warned us about in last Tuesday’s debate. Little old me and my camcorder. But no, I had to settle for the much less exciting, measured, official statement after we drove off in opposite directions and everyone checked their damn PDAs:

“General Musharraf’s decision to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution underscores the need for the United States to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy. President Bush should personally make clear to General Musharraf the risks to U.S.-Pakistani relations if he does not restore the constitution, permit free and fair elections and take off his uniform as promised. Then, we have to build a new relationship with the Pakistani people, with more non-military aid, sustained over a long period of time, so that the moderate majority in Pakistan has a chance to succeed.” –Joe Biden

But yeah, Greenville is nice.

Saturday morning I did my first ride with the Atlanta Intown Touring Club. We meandered around about a 13 mile route (after Anna and I biked the 5 miles over to downtown Decatur) and hit 5 or 6 cemeteries — some “historic,” some just plain “old” — over a couple hours. My favorite had to be Sylvester Cemetery, where a bunch of us puzzled quite a while over the terribly unfortunate Dickerson family, who had a lousy time keeping their many children alive past their third birthday.

The final stop, naturally, was Oakland Cemetery, where the staff was getting ready for its second night of Halloween tours, followed by restocking our carbohydrates in the form of beer at the Standard (hint: avoid the quesadillas; they’re just lame, in an overpriced and uncreative way), and then more liquid carbs at the Brewhouse. After about 25 miles of riding that day, it wasn’t the bucket of PBR that was making me walk all wobbly.

If you’ve got two wheels and fancy local culture, you should definitely check out the touring club.

I just got back from listening to Hillary Clinton accept the endorsement of Congressman John Lewis and deliver a bunch of canned, fluffy Let’s Turn This Country Around rhetoric that left her devoted following weak in the knees.

Bla, bla, bla.

Almost a thousand miles away, at almost the exact same time, a political event that hints at what it’ll really take to turn this country around was going down in Iowa. I’d like to see Hillary pull off something like this:

The Oscar and Felix of politics? Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, would be strong contenders for “The Political Odd Couple of the Year Award” – if one existed.

On matters of policy, they don’t share that much in common – except what to do about Iraq.

So, the two presidential hopefuls will meet up in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday to talk about their plan to bring stability to the war torn nation. Specifically, the two senators will discuss their legislation that calls for decentralizing Iraq’s federal government and giving more control to local and regional groups. Their amendment passed easily in the Senate last week.

“Partisan politics must not come in the way of finding a solution to the war in Iraq,” Biden said in a statement. “The overwhelming majority of Americans want us to get our troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible without leaving chaos behind.”

Over on an Iowa blog, a John Edwards supporter looks at this kind of event and gets angry:

But this really annoys me. Aside from the fact that I think any partition plan is doomed to fail, Biden is throwing Senate Republicans a life raft. Now they can credibly say that they have voted for a solution to the Iraq problem.

Talk about the kind of retarded partisan-at-all-costs attitude you expect from some DailyKossacks that have the Right foaming at the mouth to accuse us yet again of being national security nincompoops! Yes, let’s not try to change course in Iraq because it’s better partisan politics to keep Republicans over the barrel! Great idea, demoinesdem!

To know me is to know that many Republican politicians make me want to eat glass, but come on: getting this country out of Iraq safely — and getting a better health coverage system, and ameliorating the Iran situation, and shifting our national energy portfolio away from the destruction of the planet — is going to take just this kind of bipartisanship, like it or lump it.

Today, Hillary Clinton had John Lewis by her side.

Well yeah, that was the easy part.

Feel fortunate that my brain is too fried with math to tell you a delightfully detailed story about the horrible thing that happened in my mouth this week; may you live your whole life without needing a prosthodontist (but if you need one, I got a good one). Instead, Happy Friday Picture Pages, courtesy of my richly undeserved evening at the Botanical Garden!

Here’s wishing you a harmonious feeling of well-being!